


Displacement (Separation)

by Chaos_Greymistchild



Category: Bleach
Genre: Blood and Gore, Blood and Violence, Body Horror, CROSS IM SORRY I LIED I MANAGED TO SHOEHORN SOME TIMETRAVEL IN ARE YOU PROUD OF ME, Dimension Travel, Eye Trauma, I Can't Believe I Wrote This, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Literally All Of This Was Written On The Phone, M/M, No Seriously Everyone, Violence, everyone dies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-07 08:10:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18869209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chaos_Greymistchild/pseuds/Chaos_Greymistchild
Summary: Aizen wins.Ichigo and Kisuke try to travel back in time, to go back and fix everything. Until somethingyanksthem sideways.They wake up instead in a world where Aizen (still) wins, Soul Society is being ruled by him as a dictatorship masked as a utopia, Heuco Mundo is even more of a wasteland than it already was, and the Living World is an empty blankness.





	1. Desolate (Razed)

**Author's Note:**

> Day 1: ~~Canon Divergence | Time loop~~ | Time Travel/Dimension Travel

Ichigo  sits up, confused. He’s... lost, he supposes. 

The area around him is barren. Scorched. The land itself is  _ scarred _ . 

“Kisuke?” He calls out into the abyss of the wasteland, reaching out with his  reiatsu . “Kisuke? Are you there?”

A groan and a waving arm emerged from underneath a pile of ruins that  Ichigo  assumed was what remained of a building. Cautiously, he reached out with his  reiatsu  and tasted the air. It was Kisuke under that wood and concrete. 

He breathed a sigh of relief. The only thing that never lied, the only thing that could never be faked or covered in illusions, was  reiatsu .

He pulled the older man from under the ruins quickly as a rumbling sounded in the distance.

Rumbling was never good, and  Ichigo  didn’t want to find out what would still be alive in such a barren wasteland.

Kisuke had the same thought, as the older man dragged him into the shadow of a half-collapsed wall as soon as he was free of the rubble.

They peer around the wall, and watch as a... horde of wild, feral people emerge from the back and sides of a monster of a truck, laden with guns and spikes.

It doesn’t take much to convince the two of them to stay hidden. 

More accustomed to hiding and spying, Kisuke is the one to watch the feral people while  Ichigo  slinks back behind the wall. Orange hair is still a sun-blaze banner, even in a desert land. 

Kisuke watches as the wild-people spread out in a loose formation, picking heir way through the ruins, searching for.... something.

He would creep closer, but Kisuke worries about  Ichigo , who still has little notion of stealth. 

So he stays hidden, in the shadow of the same rubble that buried him, and keeps a hand on  Benihime’s  hilt, prepared to draw at any moment.

Ichigo  keeps a wary hand on the  daisho  that is  Zangetsu  as well. 

The scientist in Kisuke, constantly curious part of him, is buzzing with questions and wants to burst out of hiding to interrogate the wild-people as they pick up seemingly useless pieces of scrap metals and plastics off of the ground with reverence and and dust the desert sands from them. The  Onmitsukidou  part of him, wary and silent, and the warrior in him, war-hardened and fierce, are suspicious, quiet, stealthy, unwilling to give up surprise or advantage.

Kisuke breathes a sigh of relief as the horde of wild-people drive off on their truck, and slips from the shadows of the wall when the clouds of dust disappear completely over the horizon.  Ichigo  mirrors him, taking his hand off of the handles of  Zangetsu  and  Tensa .

“Any idea where we are?”  Ichigo  asks a little more sharply than perhaps entirely necessary.

For a long, heavy moment, Kisuke doesn’t say anything, just tilts his head so that his hat covers his eyes as he thinks. Then, he begins to speak, low, uncertain in sputtering bursts.

“I think.... something— no, some _ one _  interfered. I- I aimed for a simple hundred years past. And even if I miscalculated, we would have simply landed within a 50 year margin. I built a failsafe. A safety catch for a small margin of error. We... were brought here for a reason.”

Ichigo  subsides. “Sorry,” he murmurs. 

Kisuke waves off the apology. He’d known even before  Ichigo  had opened his mouth that the younger would lash out in frustration and pain.

A scream in the distance.

Their heads whip around and home in on the origin of the piercing sound with unerring accuracy. Instantly,  Ichigo  was racing off across the desert sands, all his protector instincts activating from dormancy at once. Kisuke cursed and followed close behind, kicking into  shunpo  to catch up in a single, quick burst of speed.

Kisuke notes with approval that his student at least has the sense to keep to a human speed, though admittedly a fast one verging on preternatural.

It is surely no coincidence, he feels, that a cry for help sounds as soon as they come out of hiding.

(As an  Onmitsukidou , his own favoured trap had been a piteous cry for help, after all)

When they reach the source of the scream, they see it is a child of around thirteen years. She is bloodied and bruised, her left leg shattered like kindling and her right eye hidden beneath a dirtied scrap of fabric. Her hair is shaved close to her head and even as they watch, the dry wind barely ruffles the tight curls.  Ichigo  bends down to see a golden iris. He beckons to Kisuke and shows the scientist the eye as familiar to him as his own.

Kisuke goes cold.

He stares down that child with her broken body and Hollow eyes.

Ichigo  reaches down and nudges the still body, before he can get a word in edgewise.

She springs into action, jackknifing off of the ground and snapping her mouth closed around the space  Ichigo’s  throat had just occupied.

Kisuke steps forward fluidly to fill up the space that  Ichigo  ha d  stood in, and sweeps the blunted edge of  Benihime  around in a wide sweep that clotheslines the Hollow-girl. She snarls and spits at him, clawing at the ground for breath, then to regain her balance on her good three limbs.

This close to her, Kisuke can see the thin, whisker-like scars that adorn her cheeks, the sharp, pointed teeth, and the long, hardened nail-claws. With those eyes in mind, it doesn’t take much to connect her claws and teeth with  Ichigo’s  Vizard form. 

He steps back slightly and claws at his face in a familiar motion.

Ichigo  summons his Hollow Mask without further prompting. 

The Hollow-girl utterly stills and topples over, unbalanced. She twists to show her vulnerable stomach and bares her throat. 

Finally, the Onmitsu-soldier-warrior-spy in Kisuke relaxes.

His inner scientist squeals with joy. He wants to quench his curiosity, wants to ask questions at the speed of a  Shihoin shunpo , wants to take her into his lab for a series of tests. There is a whole  _ world _  to explore. He restrains himself. Last time he gave into his curiosity, he’d plunged the entire world — all three major dimensions of it — into a war fierce enough to rip through dimensions.

“Who are you?” He asks instead, hand still on  Benihime . 

“Fuck you!” She rasps at him, as though she hadn’t spoken for a long time. 

Ichigo’s  frown deepens. “Name?”

“ Akako ,”

“Oh, I see how it is!” Kisuke pouts, “no, go on, ignore me, it’s not like I’m important anyways,”

“ Geta-boshi ,”  Ichigo  says in a long-suffering tone. 

Kisuke smiles down at his partner, mirth curling his eyes into half-moons, and fan dancing at the edges of his smile.

“Oh, no, I’m so unimportant I might as well not be here! Well, I’ll just go leave you two to your conversation then, will I?” He gives a cheerful, careless laugh and watches as the Hollow-girl’s eyes narrow in suspicion and flicker to  Ichigo’s  as if to check that he’s still there. 

It takes a great effort to turn his back on her nonchalantly, seemingly without a care in the world. 

Still, he does it.

He walks away.

(It feels like abandonment). 

He catches movement in the corner of his eye.

“ Ichigo !” He shouts.

Ichigo  grabs the Hollow-girl, and rolls behind a sand dune, flattening his body to hide from view. Kisuke ducks behind a different one, half-hidden. He curses quietly, and rips his hat from his head and shoves it beneath the sand. Damn all the wild-people to Hell, he  _ likes _  this  hat!

He peaks over the dune, hoping that the blonde of his hair would allow him the camouflage that  Ichigo  would never be able to achieve. 

His movement must have caught the eye of one of the wild-people, as a pair begin to move cautiously in his direction.

Carefully hidden under the dune, his hand crept for  Benihime’s  hilt. 

Stars sparked behind his eyes and he tasted sand. Darkness tunnelled his vision and  Benihime  fell just shy of his slack fingers. With the last of his strength, Kisuke reaches across the tangled mesh that had become their intertwined  reiatsu  to whisper in  Ichigo’s  mind. 

_ Don’t attack. Find me. Search and Destroy. I love you. _

Abandonment tastes like shattered hearts and sand and the ashes of the dead, Kisuke finds. 


	2. Royal (Forgotten)

Kisuke wakes to the slow hammering of a forge and the burning stench of smoke.  

“Awake?” A voice growls.  

He gives up any and all pretence of sleep.  

Kisuke rolls onto his stomach and pushes himself up with a groan. Light dances in his vision as his head dips and sways.  

“Fuck,” he swears, for once too angry and battered and broken to cover himself with his shopkeeper guise. His lip curls sardonically. He doubts levity would hold any sway with the wild, feral people of the sands who took him anyways.  

He’s proven right when, a moment later, the owner of the voice kicks him viciously in his ribs. He coughs and collapses as that jolts his head and white lightening shoots through his skull.  

Another kick lands on his stomach, then his back, and blows are raining down on him from above, stars exploding in his vision.  

Then he’s dragged upright, a hand grabbing him roughly on the arm and hoisting him off of the ground. The lights disappear from his sight.  

“Nice reception you’ve got here,” he coughs out between bloodied lips and cracked ribs. “I can see why you would need to kidnap people as opposed to inviting them.” 

He spluttered and gasped for breath when a heavy punch landed on his gut in retaliation.  

“Don’t you dare insult the King!” A gravely snarled next to his ear.  

Kisuke tilted his head upwards slightly to squint up at the guard holding him up. “What King?” He slurred out. “Kings are rulers. Last I figured, this is just a patch of barren ground. Or are you a King of dust and sand?” 

That earned him a broken leg, shattered into a hundred small pieces, like shrapnel from a metal bomb.  

“I ask the questions here,” a voice says above him.  

Kisuke feels himself pale.  

Oh Soul King. Oh, by the Soul King, the Royal Guard, and his Father. Oh, please no. Anyone but him.  

A hand grabs his chin and drags his face up to stare into the familiar acid yellow pupil and pitch black sclera of a Hollow, framed in white locks on an albino-pale face.  

Oh, Soul King, Palace Guard, and Mother Death. This really wasn’t his day, was it.  

* * *

When Kisuke and the ferals finally left his vision, and subsequently he had left theirs, Ichigo hauled Akako up by the scruff of her neck like a kitten and scowled down at her fiercely.  

“Who were those people?” He asked in a voice close to a growl.  

“The King’s Men,” she replied promptly. Eerily so.  

Ichigo brushes that thought off. The most important thing was finding and rescuing Kisuke.  

The King’s men, huh. That implies that there was a King who ruled this desert wasteland.  

“Who’s the King?” He asked Akako.  

“He’s the King,” she said confused, “He doesn’t have a name, everyone just knows him as King,” 

Ichigo was far from satisfied with that answer and she must have read that on his face. “He looks just like you!” She squeaked quickly, “Just like you except his eyes are _yellow_ , yours are more orangey. And he’s white all over. You have more colour than he does,” 

“How do you know what he looks like?” Ichigo asked, voice hollow and empty and blood drained from his face.  

“He invites fighters into his court. Sometimes he spares the younger-looking ones.” 

At least on this screwed up world far from home, some things stayed constant.  

* * *

“Who are you?”  

“Urahara Kisuke,” slipped out between his lips before he could help himself, “Just a humble candy store owner,” he added with a cheery smile and laugh to cover up his slip up.  

The Hollow’s smile widened. “A candy store owner, huh? Haven’t seen those for a while. Tell me, you got any stock left?” 

“Ahh, for you, Kingsy, I’ve got just the treat, deserving of royalty! Do you prefer sweet or sour?” 

“Spicy,” The Hollow said with an amused chuckle.  

Kisuke laughs with it, “I can’t do spicy, but maybe you’ll appreciate a little bit of sweetness in your life.” 

He leans upwards and forwards and kisses the Hollow, smack in the lips, letting it taste the strawberry chapstick he wears just to mess with Ichigo. The Hollow leans into it at first, humouring him with an amused glint in its eyes, before it registers the taste of strawberries - a little slow as always, just like when— Kisuke gave himself a mental slap to shake the thought from his mind.  

The Hollow rears back, eyes a poisonous, gleaming yellow and lips a snarling, teeth-baring display, full of fury and teeth sharp enough to cut glass and rend soul.  

A blinding pain in the left side of his face. Kisuke reels back. There’s barely any sensation left there, except for pain, but Kisuke thinks he can feel a liquid roll down his neck. Blood. He’d never forget that scent.  

And Kisuke laughs. Laughs and laughs and laughs, his hysterical chuckles turning into insane shrieking gales that sound more like screams. He laughs and screams through his shredded tongue, the gaping hole where his cheek, nose, and part of his lower jaw used to be, and the eyeball — his  eyeball — stuck in the back of his throat. 

* * *

“Las Noches?” Ichigo asks with no little amount of surprise.  

His other-dimensional, alter-Hollow was camped out in the remnants of Las Noches? Aizen’s old castle? 

“He built the place,” Akako chirps, far more comfortable talking with him without anyone else around — which makes Ichigo close his eyes for a moment, feeling terribly, terribly alone at the reminder that Kisuke had been taken away  _and he had let them_. He hadn’t even fought back.  

“Ichigo-sama?” Akako asks, “why are you feeling sad?” 

“Because Kisuke is gone,” he tells her, voice leaden with guilt.  

“But you’re better off without that man!” She told him, childish authority and arrogance ringing clear through her voice, “He’ll just drag you down. And Las Noches is impenetrable anyways. It’s just a waste of time and energy and food,” 

Ichigo flinches. “Kisuke isn’t useless,” he hissed at her, anger and self-loathing bubbling over in a vicious tide. “Don’t you  _dare_  talk about him that way,” 

Akako doesn’t look the least afraid of him, is even a little soothed at the Hollow reiatsu suddenly shot through his soul and peppering the air.  

Ichigo turns away, suddenly aware that as much as she might look like it, Akako was never and never will be an innocent little girl in need of protecting. Akako is a monster who eats souls, all wrapped up nice and pretty in the shape of a little girl to draw in the predators turned prey. Like a Venus flytrap, ready to pounce on anyone or anything that drew close. Inhuman in both body and mind, incapable of emotions or empathy. 

The perfect predator, evolved and borne out of this wasteland graveyard.  


End file.
